Pitchfork Music Festival

Pitchfork Music Festival

Official logos for the Pitchfork Music Festival
Location(s)	Chicago 2006-Present
Years active	2006–present
Founded by	Pitchfork Media
Date(s)	July
Genre	Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Rap, Hip Hop
Website	www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com

The Pitchfork Music Festival is an annual summer music festival organized by Pitchfork Media and held in Union Park in Chicago, IL. The festival, which is normally held over three days (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) in July, focuses primarily on artists and bands from alternative rock, rap & hip-hop, electronica, and dance music, although it has also included acts from hardcore punk, experimental/avant-garde rock and jazz in its lineups.

History

2011

The 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival was held on July 15–17 at Union Park. Three-day passes for the event sold out in one day.

2011 Lineups

Friday: Animal Collective, Battles, James Blake, Curren$y, Das Racist, EMA, Gatekeeper, Guided by Voices, Neko Case, Thurston Moore, TuNe-yArDs

Saturday: Julianna Barwick, Chrissy Murderbot, Cold Cave, Destroyer, The Dismemberment Plan, DJ Shadow, Fleet Foxes, G-Side, Gang Gang Dance, No Age, OFF!, Sun Airway, Twin Shadow, Wild Nothing, Woods, Zola Jesus

Sunday: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Baths, Cut Copy, Darkstar, Deerhunter, The Fresh & Onlys, HEALTH, How to Dress Well, Kurt Vile, Kylesa, OFWGKTA, Shabazz Palaces, The Radio Dept., Toro Y Moi, TV on the Radio, Superchunk, Twin Sister, Yuck

2010

The fifth annual Pitchfork Music Festival was held on July 16–18 at Union Park. Three-day passes for the festival sold out in under a week. 2010 marked the first and only year that the festival included a stand-up comedy stage.

2010 Lineups

Friday (Music Stages): Broken Social Scene, El-P, Liars, Modest Mouse, Robyn, The Tallest Man on Earth

Friday (Comedy Stage): Hannibal Buress, Wyatt Cenac, Eugene Mirman, Michael Showalter

Saturday: Sharon Van Etten, Bear in Heaven, Dâm-Funk, Delorean, Free Energy, Freddie Gibbs, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, LCD Soundsystem, Netherfriends, Panda Bear, Raekwon, Real Estate, The Smith Westerns, Sonny & the Sunsets, Titus Andronicus, Kurt Vile, Why?, Wolf Parade

Sunday: Allá, Beach House, Best Coast, Big Boi, CAVE, Girls, Here We Go Magic, Lightning Bolt, Local Natives, Major Lazer, Cass McCombs, Neon Indian, Pavement, St. Vincent, Sleigh Bells, Surfer Blood, Washed Out

2009

The 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival was held July 17–19, 2009. On Friday night all of the performing bands played sets consisting of songs voted for online by ticket-holders in an event Pitchfork called "Write the Night: Set Lists by Request."

2009 Lineups

Friday: Built to Spill, The Jesus Lizard, Tortoise, Yo La Tengo

Saturday: The Antlers, Beirut, Black Lips, Bowerbirds, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Disappears, DOOM, The Dutchess and the Duke, Final Fantasy, Fucked Up, Lindstrøm, Matt and Kim, The National, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Plants and Animals, Ponytail, Wavves, Yeasayer

Sunday: Blitzen Trapper, DJ/Rupture, Dianogah, The Flaming Lips, Frightened Rabbit, Grizzly Bear, Japandroids, Killer Whales, M83, The Mae Shi, Mew, Michael Columbia, Pharoahe Monch, The Thermals, The Very Best, Vivian Girls, The Walkmen, Women

2008

The 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival was held July 18–20, 2008. Three-day passes for the event sold out in May. On Friday night the promotion company All Tomorrow's Parties again collaborated with Pitchfork to present a "Don't Look Back" stage, on which all of the evening's bands performed one of their classic albums in its entirety.

2008 Lineups

Friday: Mission of Burma (performing Vs.), Public Enemy (performing It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back), Sebadoh (performing Bubble and Scrape)

Saturday: !!!, Animal Collective, Atlas Sound, Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar, Caribou, Elf Power, Extra Golden, Jarvis Cocker, Dizzee Rascal, Fleet Foxes, Fuck Buttons, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, The Hold Steady, Icy Demons, Jay Reatard, No Age, The Ruby Suns, Titus Andronicus, Vampire Weekend

Sunday: The Apples in Stereo, Bon Iver, Boris, Cut Copy, Dinosaur Jr., Dirty Projectors, The Dodos, Ghostface and Raekwon, Health, High Places, King Khan and the Shrines, Les Savy Fav, M. Ward, Mahjongg, Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, Spiritualized, Spoon, Times New Viking

2007

The 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival was held on July 13–15, 2007, again in Union Park. The festival was sold out with 48,000 visitors.

On the festival's opening night all of the performing bands played all the songs from one of their classic albums. These three sets were part of a collaboration with British promoters All Tomorrow's Parties as part of their "Don't Look Back" series.

During the 2007 festival, musician and performance artist Yoko Ono performed "Mulberries," a song about her time in the countryside after the Japanese collapse in World War II, for only the third time in her life, with Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth; Ono had previously performed the song once with her husband John Lennon and once with her son Sean Lennon.

2007 Lineups

Friday: GZA (performing Liquid Swords), Slint (performing Spiderland), Sonic Youth (performing Daydream Nation)

Saturday (Mainstages): Battles, Califone, Cat Power and Dirty Delta Blues Band), Clipse, Grizzly Bear, Iron & Wine, Mastodon, Yoko Ono, The Twilight Sad, Voxtrot

Saturday (Tent): Beach House, Girl Talk, Dan Deacon, Fujiya & Miyagi, Ken Vandermark's Powerhouse Sound, Oxford Collapse, Professor Murder, William Parker Quartet

Sunday (Mainstages): De La Soul, Deerhunter, Junior Boys, Jamie Lidell, Stephen Malkmus, Menomena, The New Pornographers, of Montreal, The Ponys, The Sea and Cake

Sunday (Tent): Brightblack Morning Light, Cadence Weapon, The Cool Kids, Craig Taborn's Junk Magic, The Field, Fred Lonberg-Holm's Lightbox Orchestra, Klaxons, Nomo

2006

The 2006 Pitchfork Music Festival was the first festival organized and run entirely by Pitchfork Media. This was also the only year that the Pitchfork and Intonation Music Festivals were held in the same year. The 2006 Pitchfork festival drew more than 35,000 visitors to listen to 41 bands on July 29 and 30.

2006 Lineups

Saturday: 8 Bold Souls, Art Brut, Band of Horses, Tyondai Braxton, Chicago Underground Duo, Chin Up Chin Up, Matthew Dear, Destroyer, Flosstradamus, The Futureheads, Ghislain Poirier, Hot Machines, Man Man, The Mountain Goats, Silver Jews, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Walkmen

Sunday: Aesop Rock, Ada, Bonde do Role, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Devendra Banhart, Dominik Eulberg, Danielson Famile, Diplo, Glenn Kotche, Jeff Parker/Nels Cline Quartet, Jens Lekman, Liars, The National, Spoon, Tapes 'n Tapes, Tarantula A.D. aka Priestbird, Yo La Tengo

2005

In 2005 Pitchfork Media was hired by a music promotion company called Skyline Chicago to curate the Intonation Festival at Union Park in Chicago. While this was not technically the "Pitchfork Music Festival," because of Pitchfork Media's prominent role in the event as well as its future success in staging similar festivals at the same location, many Chicagoans and music fans consider the 2005 event to be for all intents and purposes the first Pitchfork festival and refer to it by that name.

The event's featured performers included Tortoise, The Decemberists, The Go! Team, Les Savy Fav, Broken Social Scene, Andrew Bird, Robert Pollard, and The Hold Steady.

External links

• Official site
• Cokemachineglow 4-part coverage
• Pitchfork TV has many past performances from 2007 and 2008 Pitchfork Music Festivals
• Gigposters Gigposter's page of Pitchfork Music Festival's concert posters
• Riverfront Times coverage of Pitchfork Music Festival 2008